Paper Mario: Sticker Star

Genre: Turn-Based RPG / Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is an RPG with Action-RPG elements released on Nintendo 3DS in 2012, and many point to this game as being the low point in the Paper Mario series, and also when things started to go wrong for the series.

Previously, the first two Paper Mario games on Nintendo 64 and GameCube were celebrated for their great story, their creativity, and their clever reimagining of the Mario World into a real place peopled by Toads, Goombas, and other Mario series stock characters, all rendered using a paper aesthetic that was both charming and at least originally may have made it easier to fit the game’s world onto a Nintendo 64 cartridge.

Then, in 2007, the Wii received what many likely saw as a spin-off of the Paper Mario series, Super Paper Mario, which used the aesthetic and general concept of the Paper Mario series, and applied it to a Platformer, using the Paper theme as a bridge between 2D and 3D gameplay. This game had its ups and downs, but was generally unique and original enough that its strengths outweighed its weaknesses. However, fans still yearned for a “real” Paper Mario sequel, and ideally something that would follow in the footsteps of the beloved GameCube game, The Thousand-Year Door.

What we got instead was Paper Mario: Sticker Star.

I want to reiterate that I try to judge games on their own merits, on what the game is and not on what the game isn’t. However, I would be remiss not to detail the ways that this game was a massive disappointment to Paper Mario series fans, as if crumpled up and threw in a wastebasket so many of the things that people loved about the series. Gone were many of Paper Mario’s RPG elements – players in Paper Mario no longer leveled up and saw their stats increase, there were no more badges that let players customize their character build, no “partner” characters to add personality and variety to the player’s party (now stripped down to simply Mario himself), and in combat you couldn’t even select which enemy you wanted your attack to target! However, in addition to this many players felt like Sticker Star was far more generic and sapped of personality in comparison to the first two games and especially Thousand-Year Door – the game was largely missing characters like Toadsworth or other unique Toads, Goombas, Koopa Troopas, and so on.

However, that’s all talking about what this game isn’t, so let’s address what it is, and what it has to offer players in place of all that’s been removed from prior Paper Mario games.

At the very least, when it comes to presentation, Paper Mario: Sticker Star is lovely, with bright, colorful 3D visuals that do a good job conveying the idea of an entire world made out of paper, thanks largely to some very good animation. This is backed by a bouncy soundtrack that befits the jovial world of the Mario universe and this game’s light-hearted story.

On the topic of story, this game’s story is indeed somewhat basic – when Mario, Peach, and a crowd of Toads are in the midst of having a celebration of a magical sticker comet, Bowser crashes the party, causing the comet to break and magically empowering him and his cronies to wreak stickery havoc across the kingdom. Subsequently, Mario is enlisted to right this wrong by Kersti, a sticker (to be clear, that’s a piece of paper with a sticky backing) in the shape of a crown.

For a story premise in a Mario franchise game, it’s not horrible, but it’s nothing special either, and there definitely seems to be a decent amount of worldbuilding that other Paper Mario games had that this game lacks. However, at the same time the characters in this game still have plenty of personality, and the quality of the writing is overall pretty good.

Unfortunately, the real issue with this game is combat. This game still makes use of the combination of turn-based and real-time RPG-style combat seen in earlier games in the Paper Mario series, even if it lacks traditional leveling up and stats. However, even beyond this, Sticker Star also lacks regular attacks, with every attack in the game having now been replaced by “stickers”, which are all basically single-use items. I’m not sure if anyone told Nintendo that the thing stickers are known to do is stick, and as such it would be expected that they would stay after you use them, but if someone did tell them this they very clearly chose to ignore this bit of common knowledge.

Unfortunately, making everything about expendables means that players will be corralled into a hoarding mentality in the game, and players may well find themselves hesitating to use more impressive attacks due to how difficult they are to replace. And because there’s no real benefit to battling, players will feel encouraged to avoid combat with enemies as often as possible. What’s worse, both puzzles and bosses in the game absolutely rely on “thing” stickers (stickers of everyday household objects), the need for which is often not conveyed to the player, leading to a lot of trial and error… or simply keeping a walkthrough guide handy.

In the end, is Paper Mario: Sticker Star a bad game? No. It’s still colorful and inventive, with fun writing and some unique ideas, and it makes good use of its paper world in creative ways. However, in exploring some of these creative ideas, it has thrown out beloved and perfectly good parts of prior Paper Mario games in favor of new elements that are nowhere near as good, and at times just outright bad. So even though I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this is a bad game, it is absolutely a disappointment, and a low point for the series.

tl;dr – Paper Mario: Sticker Star is a Turn-Based RPG with Real-Time elements during combat, and for this entry in the long-running franchise Nintendo unwisely decided to discard much of what fans loved about the Paper Mario series and replace it with mechanics that are tedious, frustrating, and poorly thought-out. The resulting game still has much of the fun and charm of the Paper Mario series, but it definitely feels like a pale shadow of the great games it is a sequel to.

Grade: C+

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